Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus Comes Out

Canonical has released Ubuntu 17.04. Zesty Zapus is the latest in a line of 26 releases to feature alliterative names with animals in them. Unity is still the desktop environment, but that will change with the release of 18.04 next year.

Canonical will support 17.04 for nine months, until January 2018. 17.10 will follow in six months, after which 18.04 will be the next lts release in a year, a release with longer support. In 17.04, Unity 7 is the desktop environment and users can try Unity 8, but Mark Shuttleworth recently announced that it would stop developing it. As of 18.04, Ubuntu will switch to Gnome.

Ubuntu 17.04 is available as a download for desktops and servers, both in Intel and AMD variants. Support for 32bit PPC processors has been discontinued with this release. Those who want support for longer can continue to use 16.04 LTS on hardware with a processor on ppc architecture. That version will be supported until 2021.

The new release includes the Linux 4.10 kernel, which is important for systems with an Intel Kaby Lake or AMD Ryzen processor. The list of default apps now includes LibreOffice 5.3, the first variant with support for the ribbon interface. Thunderbird 45 is available for mail, while Mozilla’s Firefox browser is included in 17.04 with version 52. Canonical has also put the release notes online.